Ever since Apple's iPhone showed up to the smartphone party, the world's been in a tizzy for touchscreen smartphones. While people awkwardly poked their screens, companies silently dropped their smartphones with physical keyboards in favor of more keyboard-less devices. Now we're lucky to get more than one or two QWERTY smartphones a year—something that I'm totally not okay with. Sure, phones with keyboards are generally chunkier than their touchscreen-only counterparts, but in an age when people text more than talk, I'd say that physical keyboards are still pretty damn important. Here are three big reasons why you would want a phone with a QWERTY keyboard.

You aren't limited by your screen

The first big benefit of having a QWERTY smartphone is that you are no longer held back by your phone's screen size or responsiveness. Trying to type on a phone with a tiny screen is enough to make you want to jam your fingers through the screen in frustration. Even if you have a phone with a giant 5-inch display, your typing speed is limited by the responsiveness of that device's screen. You can have the skinniest, fastest thumbs in the world and you'd still only be able to get out just a small handful of words per minute.

Having dirty or wet fingers can also affect your typing performance, as most capacitive screens will have trouble sensing your touch if your hands aren't clean and dry. And yet, no matter how spotless your hands are, constantly touching your screen will leave it forever stained with the oils that secrete from your fingertips and can lead to intense amounts of bacteria living on your phone screen. You know, that screen you press up to your face every time you make a call?

Having a physical keyboard may not prevent bacteria from getting on your phone, but at least you aren't rubbing your hands all over the display every time you want to send someone a text message.

You can touch type

Let's try something: Turn off your phone's autocorrect and try typing a text message without looking at the screen. Go on, I'll just wait right here. Finished? Did it look something like this?

It's a huge unreadable mess, right? That's because you can't type on a touchscreen keyboard all that accurately without looking at it. Every phone and operating system has its own keyboard, and that keyboard may change slightly depending on the app you're using, or the way you hold your phone. Even when you do look at it, your fingers are probably bigger than the keys, so you'll likely frequently press the wrong button and come up with nonsense text like the above.

While not all physical keyboards on smartphones are the same, they at least don't change from app to app. The keys always remain in the same space, and some keyboards have nubs over the "F" and "J" keys to make it easier to touch type. Not only that, but keys on mobile keyboards are normally big enough that you don't have to worry about pressing the "U" key when you were trying to hit "I".

Speaking of which...

Autocorrect isn't an issue

That's right, the bane of every smartphone user's existence isn't that big of a problem when you aren't using your thumbs to accidentally press five different keys at once. Sure, autocorrect has its benefits (like when you misspell a word or are trying to type something while half awake/drunk), but for the most part, it's an annoyance we put up with because we wanted keyboard-less phones.

I don't care how much time you spent training your autocorrect software to figure out what you are trying to say, it's still not going to be as accurate or as fast as you typing out your message right the first time.

Do you have a QWERTY phone that you simply can't part with? Let us know in the comments below.

This story, "3 Reasons QWERTY phones are awesome" was originally published by
TechHive.

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